http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
WHAT DID BILL CLINTON think he was doing in Seattle last week? He invites
leaders from all over the world to a new round of talks on lowering trade
barriers. They find themselves besieged by anti-trade demonstrators:
environmentalists, protectionists, anarchists, lunatics. The president-host
then shows up--and makes the demonstrators' case!

Startling his own negotiators (and pleasing Big Labor), Clinton goes way
beyond the official U.S. position about tacking environmental and labor
standards onto tariff talks. He declares publicly that he favors imposing
sanctions on countries that violate such standards.

This astonishing expansion--and subversion--of what were supposed to be
negotiations about reducing tariffs terrified the delegates. India and
Indonesia and Egypt understand what the rich countries' newfound concern
for the working conditions of their poor-country competitors is all about.

It is a transparent form of protectionism. It is a way to ensure that countries
in the early stages of industrialization are deprived of their one tool for
competing economically: lower wages.

Sure, the working conditions in these developing countries are awful. But
not compared with the feudal alternative these former peasants face if they
lose their factory jobs. And not compared with conditions at a comparable
period in the West's industrialization 150 years ago.

It took us decades to raise wages and working conditions to what they are
today. Trying to mandate them on countries just emerging from feudalism is
a simple and obvious way to shut them out of the world economy.

So what is Clinton doing? Grandstanding, yes. Preening, yes. Proving that
the lame duck is still relevant, yes. But above all, Clinton is running.

Running? Does not the 22nd Amendment stop him from running? No. It
stops him from serving. Nothing can stop this man from running.
Campaigning is the one constant in his life, the one thing for which he has
both an addiction and a talent. He has decided to turn the election of Al
Gore into a referendum on his own tenure.

Seattle was a way for Clinton to prove his bona fides with labor, which has
been very cross with him and Al about trade. Gore desperately needs
labor's support to win the presidency. Remember: Gore is the guy who
destroyed Ross Perot in the great Larry King NAFTA debate six years
ago.

Now, normal second-term presidents welcome their final release from the
tyranny of electoral politics. They welcome the unique, short-lived
opportunity to eschew short-term goals, transcend partisan politics and act
solely in the national interest.

What does Clinton do? He uses the last year of his last term for yet more
politics. In 1992 Democratic challenger Paul Tsongas called him "pander
bear." Seven years in office have changed him not one bit.

History will judge him harshly for this. Arguably, the Clinton presidency has
had two successes: the budget, Clinton's policies helping to bring it into
surplus for the first time in 30 years; and free trade, Clinton completing the
work that his predecessors had begun on NAFTA and GATT.

Both successes are now threatened, however. The baby-boomer
retirement casts a pall on the future solvency of Social Security. And
protectionism is on the rise. After all, if in times of plenty there is this much
opposition to free trade--not just in Seattle but in Congress, where
fast-track authority was rejected--what will happen to free trade when
there is a downturn?

So what does Clinton do to shore up these successes and leave a legacy?
Does he initiate real Social Security reform? Does he stand up and say we
may have to raise the retirement age or restructure benefits, perhaps even
reducing them for the wealthy?

Nothing of the kind. Instead of running interference for politicians of both
parties to allow them to talk realistically about Social Security, he uses it
cynically as a bludgeon in budget negotiations. He makes a slogan of
saving the Social Security surplus, then actually spends some of it (as he
has for the first seven years of his presidency).

And on trade? He pulls his stunt in Seattle. Not only does he scuttle
prospects for further tariff reductions in areas that would greatly benefit the
United States (agriculture, services and intellectual property). He so
unsettles other countries' view of America as a supposed free trader as to
actually jeopardize the advances both he and his predecessors made in the
past.

Clinton's legacy is taking shape. He'll be remembered as the president
who, whenever faced with the choice of the grand or the small, the deep or
the shallow, instinctively chose the path of expedience. To the very end, it
was always politics over
history.